Elite Capture Research Articles

Famine and food security: new trends and systems or politics as usual? An introduction.

Over the past decade, famine and food insecurity have increased, yet there have been few articles with a critical analysis of their social and political dynamics. This special issue of Disasters aims to revive such analysis and to provide new insights. The special issue contains eight articles, with topics ranging from the role of global politics and neoliberal strategies, to sanctions, war, settler-colonialism, elite capture and inequalities, actions of resistance and resilience, and the challenges of famine prevention in today's global political context. The papers provide both global and local analysis, with the latter covering Kashmir, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria.

They only hate the term: policy branding and the politics of critical race theory

Abstract How does the public form preferences on racialized policy issues that are both widely discussed and broadly misunderstood? This has been the question centering around the sudden attacks on academic terms like “critical race theory” (CRT). I argue that the politicization of, and opinion polarization around, critical race theory is evidence of what I call policy branding, where political parties or organizations brand an arbitrary concept that has national salience into a policy issue. Using a series of original survey experiments, this study shows that one of the primary sources of opposition to critical race theory is the literal use of the term. I juxtapose this with evidence that the education policy issue at the core, antiracist teaching, maintained strong public, bipartisan support. This study has implications for the consequences of political elite capture of academic concepts and ideas.

Polity Size and Local Government Performance: Evidence from India

Developing countries have increasingly decentralized power to local governments. This paper studies the implications of a central element of decentralization (polity size) using population-based discontinuities that determine local government boundaries for over 100,000 Indian villages. Over the short and long run, individuals allocated into local governments with smaller populations have better access to public goods. We provide suggestive evidence that these results are related to heightened civic engagement and stronger political incentives, but not to other mechanisms such as elite capture. (JEL D72, H41, H75, H76, O17, O18, R50)

IMPACT OF POLITICAL APATHY ON THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS AND GOVERNANCE IN NIGERIA

This study investigates the multifaceted impact of political apathy on the democratic process and governance in Nigeria, with a focus on local government elections in Ogun State. Through a descriptive research design, data was collected from 230 male and female adults in Ogun State, employing stratified and simple random sampling methods. Statistical analysis, including means and correlation analysis, was utilized to examine factors contributing to political apathy, manifestations of apathy, and its consequences on governance. The findings revealed widespread agreement among respondents regarding factors contributing to political apathy, including corruption, ethnic and religious divisions, and socio-economic disparities. Moreover, low voter turnout, limited civic engagement, and elite capture of political institutions are identified as manifestations of political apathy, undermining democratic principles such as representation and accountability. The consequences of political apathy on governance are profound, exacerbating socio-economic inequalities and eroding democratic legitimacy and accountability. Recommendations are provided to address these challenges, including comprehensive governance reforms, promotion of civic engagement, and initiatives to address socio-economic inequalities. These findings underscore the urgent need for proactive measures to combat political apathy and revitalize democratic governance in Nigeria, emphasizing the importance of transparency, inclusivity, and accountability in political processes.

Divide & Conquer: Critical Informatics Approaches to Disinformation

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we use a critical informatics approach to investigate institutional disinformation around 2022–23 labor organizing at three higher education institutions: Rutgers University, Temple University, and the University of California. Our contribution to the study of disinformation is the application of critical informatics perspectives that attend to structural power dynamics of disinformation within an institutional context. Understanding the political economic dynamics of disinformation and how these dynamics function can help more solidly contextualize and clarify how and why disinformation exists across different information systems, so that solutions to this social and institutional problem of disinformation can be more appropriately addressed and understood. The study describes disinformation tactics employed by institutional leaders during higher education labor organizing including: non‐performative commitments to “community”, legal threats, misleading victories, and elite capture.

State control of school education in colonial and post-colonial India

Studies have indicated that local governments and communities can play a legitimate role in governing publicly-funded schools, although debates continue in relation to where and how decentralization operates across different contexts. In the Indian context, it has been argued that educational decentralization received a significant boost following the constitutional amendments of 1992, which mandated local government school management in rural and urban areas across India. However, drawing from the history of school management in India, we show that in colonial India, government-funded schools were locally managed by district boards and municipal bodies. By studying the education Acts of Indian states post-independence, we show that nearly all states adopted a centralized management system with state-controlled appointment and transfer of teachers and funding. Nationally, about 77% of government schools are managed by the state Department of Education, while only 18% of schools are controlled by local bodies. By analyzing sections of the Right to Education Act of 2009, we show that while the Act advocates for decentralized management of schools, it fails to devolve funds and functionaries to the local level. We argue that India's constitutional structure, weak fiscal devolution to local bodies, centralized appointment of functionaries, bureaucratic mistrust of local authorities, fear of local elite capture, upper caste control, and teacher union lobbying have led to centralized state control of education.

Democratic Innovation Beyond Contestation: The Realist Case for Authorial Empowerment

AbstractLiberal democracies face the challenge of elite capture. Mounting empirical evidence indicates that a small socioeconomic elite has vastly more influence on policy outcomes than ordinary citizens. In this essay, I explore how political reformers should address this issue by harnessing insights from the realist tradition in political theory. By placing empirics front and centre, I extrapolate two normative heuristics to guide democratic innovation. First, I maintain that reformers must increase the capacity of ordinary citizens to contest elite-biased political decisions—call this editorial empowerment. Second, ordinary citizens must be vested with additional law-making capacity to offset elite bias—call this authorial empowerment. While institutional innovations to advance the editorial power of ordinary citizens have been central to the realist debate on democratic innovation, authorial empowerment has not received adequate consideration. To address this shortcoming, I explore institutional mechanisms aimed at increasing the authorial capacity of ordinary citizens and assess their alignment with the broader realist vision of a new mixed regime.

Contesting elite capture: Repositioning insurgent planning for mass movements

Some scholars have called on insurgent planning to contest the elite capture of our cities. We take this opportunity to critique and thicken the original conceptual formulation of insurgent planning and explore the limitations of its resistance against elite capture. The view that we challenge suggests that insurgent action should be folded into institutionalized planning practice in order that urban planners—wielding expert knowledge and technical skills bestowed upon them by their discipline—might harness insurgent forces from the margins to bring about change. Instead, we leverage the “people as infrastructure” framework to argue that insurgent planning faces major challenges posed by a concretizing elite-captured urban landscape and highly entrenched, pervasive capitalist ideology. We advocate and reiterate that potent counter-elite capture tactics continuously emerge from outside of institutionalized planning, arising from the changemaking power of marginalized urbanites and, once united, into mass movements transformative of social relations.

Research on Elite Capture under the Background of Digital Rural Construction

Research on Elite Capture under the Background of Digital Rural Construction

Illegal luxuritecture: How the super-rich in Hong Kong land grab and unlawfully expand their luxury living spaces

This article introduces the concept of ‘illegal luxuritecture’ – illegal luxury architecture – to capture the way a minority of super-rich expand their living environments without planning permissions, sometimes through land grabs of government land. Typically, illegal housing is associated with the urban poor, but it is argued that through elite capture, unauthorised building works (UBWs) have also been utilised by the super-rich. This article focusses on Hong Kong where a number of illegal luxuritectural structures came to light after September 2023 when the most severe rainstorm since records began in the 19th century caused the collapse of unauthorised building works. Illegal luxuritectural construction involves illegally altering building foundations and sometimes flood protection walls, causing destabilisation of soil and creating landslides. Although failure to comply with Building (Planning) Regulations and the Buildings Ordinance is a criminal offence which can result in fines or imprisonment, findings suggest that a minority of the elite class tends to ignore these regulations. This is because, the fines for unauthorised building works are relatively small in relation to the high value of the property or the rental income generated, and prison sentences are almost never imposed. This article contributes to the current academic discussions on the super-rich in general and the housing of the global super-rich in particular.

Containing Muslims: Europe’s Lower-Strata Working-Class Muslims and the Weaponisation of Antisemitism and Islamophobia

Abstract This paper discusses the subjection of Europe’s lower-strata working-class Muslims to a politics of containment on two levels: isolation and elite capture. Departing from analogies between antisemitism and Islamophobia, it argues for a different comparison between the two that involves their effects when weaponised as discursive strategies. While the effects of the weaponisation of (‘new’) antisemitism tend to isolate Muslims through a de-essentialising good vs. bad Muslim discourse, the effects of the weaponisation of Islamophobia move towards the tendential dynamics of elite capture through a re-essentialising discourse. Instead of theorising identity-formation as a direct consequence of ideology, the paper situates both discursive strategies within a structural framework that involves Muslims’ organisational and collective- action forms, which in turn consolidate non-class identities. The paper concludes that the effects of the weaponisation of both discourses are realised in the containment of Muslims.

South Asia's unprotected poor: A systematic review of why social protection programs fail to reach their potential.

The incongruity between South Asia's economic growth and extreme poverty has led to a growing interest in social protection and subsequent implementation of anti-poverty initiatives. However, many programs have consistently fallen short of their full potential in reaching the poor. We reviewed the literature to understand the factors behind this failure. A search of EconLit, Global Health Database, MEDLINE and SocINDEX, supplemented by an external search, yielded 42 papers evaluating 23 programs. Inclusion criteria included social and political determinants of program outcomes. Articles were assessed for quality using the GRADE and GRADE CERQual criteria and analyzed using Thomas & Harding's thematic synthesis approach. We identified five themes: (1) structurally flawed program theories overlook the complexities of poverty and are rooted in simplistic cause-and-effect approaches; (2) elite capture through appropriation of benefits, powerful positioning in program implementation, and gatekeeping through relationships of patronage; (3) insufficient targeting strategies to reach the poorest; (4) neglect of gendered restrictions, hidden costs, lack of legal documentation, and physical and social exclusion; (5) active self-exclusion from social protection to maintain dignity, a perception that programs are substandard, and a lack of resources required. The review highlights the well-documented disconnect between South Asian social protection program designs and the ground realities of their 'ideal' beneficiaries. This stems from a dominance of Western-led poverty discourse that disregards the influence of caste, the challenge of effective engagement with a group whose identity remains unclear, and fast-paced funding calls that do not lend themselves to meaningful identification and collaboration with the invisible poor. We suggest this disconnect is intentional and reflects a broader power dynamic rooted in geopolitical interests and national priorities. Study limitations reflect the shortcomings of the existing literature, which largely uses quantitative research methods that fail to capture the multidimensional experiences of the poor.

Curbing Elite Capture or Enhancing Resources: Recentralizing Local Environmental Enforcement in China

Abstract Decentralization is believed to ensure better environmental governance. However, recent studies have shown that some governments recentralize local enforcement to increase the effectiveness of policy implementation. Under what conditions is recentralization the better option for environmental enforcement? This study attempts to differentiate two possible mechanisms through which recentralization can deliver better environmental outcomes: curbing elite capture and enhancing local resources. In the context of recentralization reform and with a unique dataset of local investigations into China's environmental enforcement, we demonstrate that although decentralization has been successful from many perspectives, recentralizing local environmental enforcement can produce better outcomes for pollution reduction in China, by curbing local protectionism rather than enhancing local resources. Further qualitative analysis reveals why recentralization cannot necessarily enhance local resources and capacity, even though it is designed to do so.

Factors enhancing and restricting the success of SRA compliance on the FLEGT/VPA initiative in Ghana. Insights from Juaso forest district in Ghana

This study examines the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) between Ghana and the European Union (EU) within the Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade Initiative (FLEGT). The VPA aims to enhance forest governance, reduce deforestation, combat illegal practices, and improve livelihoods of forest fringe communities. The research focuses on the implementation of social responsibility agreements (SRAs) under the VPA framework and identifies factors contributing to their success or presenting challenges. Data collection involved mixed methods, including literature review and a survey of individuals involved in SRAs. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses, including exploratory factor analysis, were conducted. Principal component analysis revealed that accountability, monitoring of implementation and progress of SRAs, and documentation of SRA agreements were key factors contributing to the success of negotiated SRAs, explaining about 68.36 % of success variance. Challenges and constraints were categorized into two main factors: weak community capacity to negotiate SRAs and weak community capacity to enforce compliance, explaining about 71.4 % of challenge variance. The study found that the exclusion of the local SRA committee (LSRAC) from certain decision-making processes affected trust and transparency in calculating SRA benefits. Elite capture of benefits was identified as an issue, as the LSRAC did not conduct sufficient consultations with community members before negotiations. The findings emphasize the importance of including local communities in all forest management activities and call for increased awareness of SRAs, particularly for the LSRAC. The study highlights the need for proper representation of community interests during negotiations and their inclusion in forest management plans.

That is What Most of Us Fail to Remember: Politics as a Neutralizing Game World Designed by Elites

Concepts such as political framing and elite capture have never been thought of as part of the humanitarian foundation of politics. This is, however, not true of identity politics. Christened in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective, identity politics was originally meant to enable a group, composed mainly of black feminist women, to build their own political agenda. Striving to see the full complexity of their values and priorities leveled with those of other political movements, identity politics was looking to reveal limitations from inside groups and widen the scale and scope of problems tackled. Unity was meant to guide society towards a better world. Nevertheless, presently, identity politics often represents a normalized separation between societies whose identities are defined by past history. No longer meant to strengthen the voices of the unheard, it has become a political tool for those exercising significant impact on the political discourse of the present. Similarly, the integrities of both values and religion have, over time, subsided to power as well. With the basic foundations of the world's politics hijacked, a race against time has begun as society's justifications for climbing over people and exploiting the planet's limited resources have driven it to the verge of a disbalance so grave it might prove impossible to reverse. Thereupon, this text aims to analyze the scope of this twisted use of politics, explore activism as a countereffect, and examine the development of society under what can be defined as a never-ending match between "dark" and "light."

Urbanization, Legacies of Elite Capture, and Multi-Dimensional Exclusions in Ghana: Towards Just Housing and Neighborhood Policies in African Cities

Persisting housing challenges in Africa’s cities are often theorized as driven by rapid demographic expansion outstripping housing supply or by the urbanization of poverty which puts the cost of adequate and serviced housing beyond the reach of many urban dwellers. This theorization links the problem of inadequate supply and low quality of housing to ahistorical, apolitical factors such as the size and income/poverty characteristics of Africa’s urban population and ignores legacies of elite capture and multi-dimensional exclusions reflected in policies and practices. Yet these policies and practices shape urban governance and who gains access to land, housing finance and ultimately serviced housing and neighborhoods. Drawing on a review of policies, media sources and literature on housing in Ghana and taking a critical postcolonial institutional theoretic approach, we argue that a more complete conceptualization of Africa’s urban housing crises should involve a close look at the regressive historical patterns of urban investments and persisting elite biases in institutions managing land, finance and housing. This re-framing of housing problems creates a more holistic framework and better articulates the unjust foundations of regressive and exclusionary policies and practices. Further, it highlights elite capture and multi-dimensional exclusions that perpetuate current housing and service failure in African cities. An explicit focus on power, exclusion and injustice is necessary to formulate and advocate alternative policies that are more likely to produce inclusive livable housing and neighborhoods. These include moratoriums on evictions, expanded slum upgrading, progressive property and land taxation, more inclusive planning systems, better regulation of rental housing and improved delivery of land and finance for transit oriented affordable public and rental housing.

“Airport city” or “VIP” urbanism? Questioning the market-led land development strategies of airports

Airport authorities are gradually shaping urban spaces through their property development: hotels, business parks, conference centers, etc. This article challenges these development strategies pursued by increasingly financialized and privatized airports in the name of “airport city” policies. It shows that the changes underway are a vivid expression of a VIP model of urbanism, in which the airport authority, maximizing its revenues and land value, naturalizes its emphasis on high-end real-estate projects, and trivializing their social reach. The analysis draws on the case of the Paris city region, characterized by land scarcity and housing issues, and its airport authority, Aéroports de Paris (ADP), one of the largest landowners in the region. Using documents from ADP, a press corpus, and interviews, we highlight how the distinctive geography at play in air terminals changes scale by being projected onto real-estate “diversification” projects, as ADP opts for urbanization centered around the upper fractions of the flying public. This market-led development leads to a form of elite capture that seeks to dwarf or endogenize other existing and potential uses and users of airport land. This article further deconstructs this urban model by shedding light on the multiple tensions it generates and pleads for a more critical debate on airport land uses and planning.

Energy services for solar PV projects: Exploring the accessibility and affordability of clean energy for rural China

China's rural solar photovoltaic projects (SPVPs), as an innovative initiative to improve livelihoods through clean energy, have played a positive role in poverty reduction. However, whether this measure can enhance energy services for rural families remains unconfirmed. This paper employs a quasi-experimental method from the perspectives of energy service accessibility and affordability to quantify the net contribution of China's rural SPVPs to enhancing family energy services. The results indicate: (1) SPVPs can significantly improve family energy services, with a net effect of 14.7 % on the energy service accessibility and a net effect of 44.5 % on the energy service affordability. (2) SPVPs can increase the energy consumption capacity, energy supply capacity and energy equipment utilization rate by 2.6 %, 7.1 % and 5 %, respectively. Furthermore, these initiatives can effectively slash the energy costs of rural families by 4.3 %, bolster the energy access affordability by 3.9 %, and catapult energy investments by an impressive 44.9 %. (3) These projects also perform well in the family energy consumption cleanliness. (4) The effect of SPVPs in providing energy services presents a regional difference, with the best performance observed in ‘Type III’ solar resource areas. Meanwhile, the implementation of China's rural SPVPs does not involve “elite capture.”

Sport for Development: A Social Movement Captured by Elites?

AbstractOver the last 30 years there has been a growth of actors involved in Sport for Development (SFD). Though some of these actors aligned with prevailing power structures, others challenged existing power structures. In that sense, the SFD movement became disparate and multi-faceted and could be seen as an emerging area that could challenge dominant structures. With time, the SFD sector has coalesced around a variety of formal structures, and these more ‘rebellious’ tendencies have been dampened. Though some have argued that these structures show adaptation or professionalisation, using Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s work as a foundation, I will argue that these changes emerged as part of a purposeful process of elite capture. In particular, elite capture has occurred in three interconnected ways. First, elite actors established standards, policies and guidelines that aligned with their interests. Second, elites imposed those standards by funding and controlling projects in the field. Finally, elites legitimised the standards they set by taking over avenues for knowledge production within SFD. Taken together, elite capture limits the ability of SFD actors to challenge the systemic factors that impede their participants and communities. To escape this, as Táíwò argues, means more than just offering representation to ‘marginalised’ groups. New structures outside of the constraints of existing ones are needed.

Opportunity Hoarding and Elite Reproduction: School Segregation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract School integration is an important indicator of equality of opportunity and racial reconciliation in contemporary South Africa. Despite its prominence in public and political discourse, however, there is no systemic evidence on the levels and patterns of school segregation. Drawing on the literature on the post-apartheid political settlement and sociological theories of opportunity hoarding, we explain how the small White minority and, to a lesser extent, the new Black middle class monopolized access to South Africa’s most prestigious schools following the abolition of de jure segregation in 1994. Using the 2021 Annual School Survey—an administrative dataset covering all South African schools—and the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study school survey, we find very high levels of school segregation along racial as well as socioeconomic lines. White students almost exclusively attend former White schools, have little exposure to the low-income Black majority, and are vastly overrepresented in elite public and private schools. We argue that in South Africa and other contexts with under-resourced education systems, elite capture of the few high-performing schools serves to reproduce race and class privilege.